The Third Revenant
by Xenutia
Summary: Unable to live with the guilt of the murder she committed, Willow attempts to set it right . . . by bringing back Warren Mears from the dead. But as a killer himself, can she justify unleashing him on the world again?
1. THE LESSER FRANKENSTEIN

THE THIRD REVENANT

**Disclaimer: **Of course I don't in any way own Buffy. I don't even own the computer I'm writing this on, technically - it's on HP. But sometimes the show raised such a great concept that it just didn't have the screen time to explore it fully. I thought I'd pick up some of the slack.  
**Rating: **PG-13  
**Pairings: **I'm assuming that six months after _Chosen _Willow and Kennedy are still together, but the story's not about that. It's more like background stuff. In _Angel _we heard that they were somewhere in Brazil at this time, so that's where I've placed them.  
**Summary: **Unable to live with the guilt of the murder she committed, Willow attempts to set it right . . . by bringing back Warren Meers from the dead. But as a killer himself, can she justify unleashing him on the world again?  
**Note: **Okay, I'm one of those weird people that just adored the Trio, and especially Warren. I honestly don't know why, but I thought it was a pity he had to be written out for the plot, as great as those episodes were. So I thought I'd bring him back to play.  
**Spoilers: **Hefty spoilers for _Seeing Red, Villains, The Killer in Me, _and _Dead Things. _Some minor allusions to _I Was Made To Love You. _Also spoilers for the _Buffy _novels _Immortal, Ghost Roads _and _The Book of Fours. _Also references to the Mary Shelley novel, _Frankenstein. _

**PART ONE - THE LESSER FRANKENSTEIN**

It has been three days since she waved Kennedy goodbye from the airport in Sao Paulo. Three days isn't so much, maybe; three days of summer could vanish in a twist of the wind. But three days, she knows, can also be forever. It can be the divide between soul and chaos. It can mean life and death.

These three have been neither, but it would be wrong of her to say that they have been as nothing - the nothing of summer, the nothing of being the one left waiting at home. Kennedy has taken a flight to Peru in answer to a call for Slayer power there, and that, she knows, will be battle enough for one only called a six bare months ago or less; but the real battle is here. The real battle is within herself, the one left behind.

Willow waits until the clock has reached its zenith and the twelfth hard chime has rang out into the silence like the cold last note of a dying symphony, her nervous fingers clutching the small leather satchel in her lap. There is no need to wait, and with Kennedy away nobody in the house to wake by moving too soon; but still she waits. She knows her power and needs no external interference, but a mystical convergence of natural means can only help her. Midnight, of course, has its own power. Before the witching hour is done, either she will have failed . . . or, the gods help her, she would have accomplished the unthinkable.

It _is _unthinkable, and she knows it; in her way, she even cares. The coven in Westbury imparted wisdom of the natural magics that she has never truly relaxed her hold of, even when the darkness called in her dreams, and over time she has come to develop the respect for those magics that she should have learned in the beginning - before the harm was done. But it is not too late, she tells herself, to undo those wrongs and bring back the balance she destroyed; it is never too late to take something back.

Even this.

At two minutes past midnight she stands, fits the carry handle of the satchel over her shoulder, and leaves the darkened apartment, letting the latch click softly behind her. Again, there is nobody to wake. She almost misses the days when Slayer, sister, and lover all resided in the same place, like a true family. She misses Buffy and Dawn. She misses Tara.

The streets of Sao Paulo are a far cry from the deserted strips of shadowy macadam where she spent her childhood. In Sunnydale, only heroes and fools left home after dark. But this is Brazil, and the vampire population is low by comparison. Humans swarm every lighted corner and every bright alley where the danger might have been. It is a human's city.

Human or not, still there are those places where someone like her may procure a few supplies, without the inconvenience of Internet shipping. She needs more, this time. It is, perhaps, the most complicated spell she has attempted, without the brazen flow of black arts doing the bidding for her; even the vital piece of the puzzle, the object clutched so gingerly in that satchel, has been conjured by her own hand - the last true item was destroyed by a demon biker almost two and a half years ago.

She walks unnoticed through the busy streets, just another young woman going on her way, to meet a date, perhaps, or to work in one of the colourful clubs that fringe the edges of downtown like night lights. Nobody stops her, nobody speaks to her. Most importantly, nobody suspects that in that bag she carries not make-up and credit cards but the last existing urn of Osiris.

There are far less cemeteries in Sao Paulo than in Sunnydale - at last count, the former Hellmouth had boasted twelve, with more proposed by the city council to accommodate the overspill - but there are enough. She does not need a whole cemetery. She only needs a single grave. A single, unmarked, grave.

And she has already picked one out.

St. Mary's is still, and under the curtain of gloom that swoons under the trees the air is thick enough to slice, like a cake. The denseness adds to the silence and to the dark, but she is wise enough to know that those two elements do not _create _it. Far older forces are responsible for that. This, like so many places of the dead, is a centre for mystical energy. She is thrumming with magic squared, this location in the heart of dark coupled with the midnight hour that she has purposefully chosen, and her nerves vibrate like plucked harp strings. But they make no sound, and she almost wishes that they would; alone and with the looming headstones of generations past surrounding her in a broken-toothed fence, she feels the oppression like a live thing. The last time, she had her friends with her. Xander, Anya, and Tara. She was with friends and she endured the ordeal _for _a friend.

But she is alone. The wind stirs the overhanging eaves of ancient boughs stemming from ancient trunks, but this is a positive sensation, one of life, and of growth. These trees channelled the power of the earth through their gnarled old wood and crippled bark, extended life-giving energy to the leaves only now just beginning to turn crisp and golden at the edges. They have fallen in glutted flurries underfoot, like a crackling carpet over the silent earth. Life to death, from the ground and back to it. She thought that might be in the Bible somewhere. It was spoken to grieving relatives at funerals, this notion of earth to earth and ashes to ashes designed, perhaps misguidedly, to bring comfort to the ones left behind. As she was.

She had not attended Tara's funeral. And the one whose life she intended to restore this night had never _had _a funeral. There had been no body to find.

The church clock sounded one across St. Mary's hallowed ground in a single, crystal chime. Its echoes rode the leaves for some time after. As the hour ended, so did her spell. Successfully. Willow swept her sweat-stung hair from her eyes, exertion pulling her lungs through her chest like reverse gravity, and watched the mound of scattered earth in front of her. She had been prepared, this time. On her knees, she had scraped the dirt from the unmarked grave of the John Doe whose bones she had chosen in his stead; on her knees, she had prepared the spot in a way she never had for Buffy. Now, as she waits and one o' clock sweeps in like a tide, she sees a moon-white, long-fingered hand reach from the earth. The arm follows; clearly masculine, coated from wrist to sleeve in soft, dark hair, almost black. His rising is easy. His resurrection was not.

Willow clutches her arm across her heaving abdomen, tasting blood in her mouth and rot in her throat, sweat clinging to her flesh until her dark clothes fitted her like shrink-wrap, and waits patiently until the rest of the man appears above ground. She had expected a fresh surge of hatred, or perhaps of guilt, to rise up from within her like an earthquake at the sight of his face; instead, she feels nothing. She should have felt everything and yet she feels nothing.

The wide brown eyes sweep around the cemetery, wild, unseeing. They alight last on her. She knows what his reaction will be.

"Get away from me, you crazy witch!"

He scrambles to his feet and the fallen earth subsides like blackened snow drifts around Willow where she kneels by the grave. He does not scream, blessedly, and he doesn't run. Perhaps the shock of death revoked is too much for that.

"Welcome back," she pants, her eyes steady on his though they look up from a position of ancient subservience. "Warren."

**2**

_She has lived with the knowledge that she carries a second soul around with her, within her, for almost a year. And this knowledge, unlike any other in her life, she has lived with alone. It has not been there since the death of the body it came from, and this leads her to wonder, for a time, where that soul has been for the months in between. Was it wandering the ghost roads, unable to move on? Lucy Hanover had told her as much. Lucy Hanover, the long-dead Slayer that had devoted her afterlife to helping the lost on their way, had told her that those torn from life by a violent death often lingered, unprepared to move on, certain that their time has not yet come. His had been not only a violent death but a mystical one, and - although this is a thought she banishes with every ounce of will she possesses - a tortured one. An untimely one. True, in some States and some eras there would have been a death penalty for what he had done . . . but still, twenty-one was too young to die. And twenty-three, conversely, is too young to carry the memory of murder within. Yet that is precisely what she has done, ever since that day when Xander reminded her of the yellow crayon. At twenty-three, Willow Rosenberg is a self-convicted killer._

But that is not as true as she would like it to be. Since Amy's Hex had transformed her, temporarily, into her victim, she has carried him inside, like a residue that refused to leave when Kennedy brought her back. That ground that had been taken from her by his disconnected soul has not been entirely returned, and for months she has heard echoes, some that tear her own thoughts from her in a breath. She has not one killer in her, but two. At last, she can't take it anymore.

She decides to take her mind back.

**3**

At no point has she considered how she might handle him if he decided to try violence - in some part of her mind, she supposes, she has allowed that she beat him once, in a battle of magic. Even without the power of those dark gods that she had called upon before, she thought she could take him again. As to the physical kind . . . Buffy had told her, explicitly enough, that as a fighter he wasn't completely unskilled, but the majority of his power in that one battle had been the result of a spell. It was unlikely that he would attempt the same without it.

She needn't have troubled herself. That one, frightened exclamation is the first and the last that he has to say, and the brown eyes become no more or less wild for his recognising her. She has so many questions that will have to wait, but for the moment the only one that matters can only be answered by herself. Even as she settled the precious urn in the damp earth and watched its glow extend to her like siren's arms, she had been uncertain of what she hoped to achieve, and how she might feel. She has known for days that if she does this, if she brings back a human being dead for almost eighteen months, then she will be responsible for him - that, for a time at least, he may be more creature than man. Or boy. Still, she doesn't know how to think of him. He has always seemed such an unlikely, and disturbing, gestalt of both.

He still stands, if that can be considered a good thing - at least he may be capable of walking - but his slightly puppy-face is blank, and yet not. Blank, because there is no recognition of his surroundings other than his obvious fear of her. Not, because something in his eyes, in the slightly parted lips, in the furrow drawn in his forehead, is turned inward, collapsed in on itself like the heart of a cyclone. She wonders, with a dread she feels ashamed of feeling, if he is remembering his death. With Buffy, the risen had remembered everything of the after. She expects nothing less from him. But she is ashamed of that feeling because in the back of her mind where her power never truly left her, she knows that he deserved it. He deserved to die, and he deserved to do so horribly. She has not brought him back because she thinks he deserves a second chance. She has brought him back to heal herself of her guilt. The next few moments will decide everything . . . if, ultimately, she will forced to do again what she has done once before, and rid the world of him. It has always been a possibility, one that she has tried to push aside, but now the moment has come where she can't ignore it any longer. If he is willing - is _capable - _of coming with her without a fight, she will continue. If he doesn't . . . but she hopes, so desperately she hopes, that it won't come to that. She doesn't know if she can do it again.

She stands, not pausing to clean the drifts of earth from her legs and hands, and hesitates a moment before going any further. There is no point in concerning herself with people in the streets seeing her like this; he is grimed with earth from the matted tangle of his black hair to the slightly tattered clothes of the John Doe she chose as the vessel - dead only a few weeks, and the clothes were good, though covered in the same black filth now - and there is no hope of cleaning him up before leaving this cemetery. She doubts she will even be able to touch him, not least because he is terrified of her, but because . . . because she doesn't know if she _can. _Whatever may have come before or after, whatever may come now, there is one thing that not even her magic will change, that nothing will _ever _change. This man killed Tara. The fact that he didn't mean to meant nothing. The bullet had been intended for her best friend and hit her girlfriend instead. She doesn't see that that qualifies as an excuse.

Funny. She hadn't thought it qualified then, either.

_It was an accident, _he had pleaded, only moments before she tore the skin from his body with a click of her fingers.

_You were trying to kill my best friend and got my girlfriend instead, _she had replied then. As now.

Dear God, what has she done? Not then . . . but tonight.

She takes a step forward, her nose wanting to wrinkle at the stench of the clothes that had formerly been host to a rotting body. She mustn't let him see that - he is scared enough of her without his thinking that she felt any disgust, as well. And it was she that had chosen the vessel, after all. Maybe she should have chosen a fresher one. But this John Doe had been unknown, unmourned by a family, and from the police reports she had hacked into had been about the same size as Warren. She had been limited in her options.

She extends a hand to him, and pauses when she sees him draw back warily. He is not quite flinching - enough of his pride and arrogance have survived the process intact to prevent such a show of vulnerability - but it is going to make things harder, nevertheless. For the first time she wishes that she had brought Kennedy into her confidence and enlisted her help. A Slayer would be a useful asset right about now.

_No, _she tells herself. _Kennedy would never have agreed. Or, she would have taken him out the second he left his coffin._

But of course, it hadn't been _his _coffin. She had denied him that when she disintegrated his mangled body.

She tries again. This time he lets her take his arm - the smell is much stronger up close - and doesn't pull back. She doesn't know if he can understand her yet or not - Buffy had been little more than an animal, and Angel . . . but that was different. Buffy had been in heaven, Angel in one of the Hell dimensions. Where Warren has been, she has no idea. But she has tried to find out.

**4**

_It has been years since she last attempted this. The first time, trapped in a crypt with Oz, Xander, and Cordelia, it had been an accident - a chance seized by spirits as trapped within their tomb as they themselves were. Those spirits had been a tormented babble made inhuman by their time lost in nothing, but one voice had transcended the melee . . . one voice had called clearly to her as she opened herself to the magic around her._

Lucy Hanover. A Slayer dead a century or more, she had chosen to remain behind on the Ghost Roads to help those lost find their way. After the Axe of Air had slaughtered her by the hand of the ancient mummy whose element she shared, she should have gone to her reward in the afterlife. But she had not.

During their first contact Lucy had mediated between the spirits of the crypt and its human occupants, at last negotiating their freedom in exchange for a favour. Willow had kept her end of the bargain, as had the spirits. Lucy had promised her help whenever it was needed.

Their second meeting had been less to Willow's liking. After a near-fatal car-accident that left her fighting for her life on an operating table, Lucy had come to her again - Lucy had come to take her on her way along the Ghost Roads. But Willow had fought for her life, and won. Lucy had vanished back into the mists of that place being living and dying.

Now she needed her help a third time.

Lucy, _she calls silently, resisting the urge to close her eyes and summon up greater focus. If Lucy answers, she may appear in some visible form. Willow does not want to miss her. _Lucy, can you hear me?

_The silence is what she expected, but not what she hoped for, and something which may have been disappointment had she been even slightly less desperate crosses her sight. Lucy, she supposes, has other, less mortal people to attend to. Is it only people? On her brief visits to the Ghost Roads, once as a living, corporeal creature and once as a soul on the cusp of leaving earth, she saw far more than humans wandering there._

Lucy? _she tries again. And this time, as faint as it is, she imagines that she hears a reply._

Little spellcaster, _says a voice from inside her head. _Not so little anymore, I see.

No, _Willow responds, half-pleased by the compliment . . . but frightened by it. Lucy surely knows, she must know, of just how far her magic has progressed since they last met. Of how she turned it to such wrong uses. Her physical growth into womanhood is not the only way in which she has changed. _Are you angry with me?

That is not my place, _Lucy replies. _That is for your friends to decide. I know they have forgiven you.

I haven't forgiven myself.

In time. What can I do for you, Willow?

_Here Willow hesitates for the first time. So many of her preparations have been made before it has even occurred to her to ask after its purpose. Its intended. The urn is conjured, the grave chosen. Kennedy has been enlisted in the hunt for a once-mythical beast deep in the Peruvian jungle. Everything is perfectly accounted for. Except for this._

I'm looking for someone, _she says, even her inner voice faltering without the vocal chords to interrupt it._

The witch, _Lucy pre-empts her. _The one called Tara Maclay. She is safe, little Willow. She only passed through here briefly, and no doubt only stopped to speak to me on your behalf. She moved on a long time ago.

_Willow feels tears well in her half-closed eyes and almost wishes that Lucy would become visible, that she would be able to see the effect her words have had on her. Tara was safe, wherever she was. Happy._

She's happy without me, _she thinks, for a moment unaware that Lucy can hear her every word._

No, little witch. But she is waiting for you. She has friends here to pass the time until then. And she likes Kennedy.

That's . . . thank you. _Willow hesitates again, for a moment struggling against the frenetic block in her throat and the mist that obscures the front room of her apartment from view. She blinks it away with a fierceness she has not felt in a long time. _But that's not who I was looking for, this time.

Oh? _Lucy sounds surprised. In that moment, even before the question has been asked, Willow knows that Lucy won't be able to help her. _Whom do you seek, little witch?

Um . . . I . . . I'm looking for a man. A Warren Meers. Have you seen him?

I don't think so, _Lucy responds gently. _But I speak to many that never give me their names.

"Oh," _Willow says aloud. Disappointed, but relieved, a mix as unpleasant as any of light and dark. It makes the emotions muddy, like too many colours blended on an artist's palette._

I'm sorry I can't help you, _Lucy says. _If I see him, I'll contact you.

Thank you.

Why do you want to find this . . . Warren Meers? _The name is faltering in Lucy's unspoken voice - it is a rare name, and perhaps even unheard of in Lucy's time._

Because I killed him, _Willow whispers. _He's there because of me.

**5**

The apartment is dark, the drapes closed, the rooms silent. She purposefully left it this way when she went out, knowing that he would be disoriented, that bright lights and loud noises will be, if not painful, then unpredictable. The last thing she wants is to startle him into some kind of violence when they are alone. Without a Slayer. Without a plan.

Can she do this? For the hundredth time, she can't help but worry that the answer will be no.

She has not had to touch him since that one brief contact in the cemetery, and for that, she is wordlessly grateful. For her it is like an arachnophobic willingly harbouring a nest of tarantulas in her lap. Like touching death. Her own, in time, but first his, first Tara's.

He has followed her in a waking daze, not speaking again, and stumbling in shoes a little too big for him as they pass like ghosts through the clutter of the streets in the morning hours. Sao Paulo never sleeps. She doubts if she herself will sleep again for a very long time. But she has only days until Kennedy's return, and if the conundrum remains unsolved by then, she will have to think of something else.

_I don't want to have to kill him again. _But still, it is a possibility. It is a likelihood.

She closes the front door behind them with a click too soft to disturb the neighbours and ushers him in. This may be Warren's body, but something in him is missing; it is as if the mind took longer to awake after death, and this was little more than a template of a man, a vessel waiting to be filled. Almost a child, in emptiness if not in form. That makes her life easier, for now. She can imagine this is his twin, or his robot - and his memories of her seem incomplete, as do his powers of speech, his motor control. His movements are gawky and lumbering, reminding her of Frankenstein's monster. The original in Mary Shelley's vision, not the hack horror movies made ever since. Does that make her Viktor Frankenstein, and Kennedy Elizabeth?

She closes her eyes, and swallows down deep. At least, there is no Clerval to muddy the proceedings. No brothers and sisters for him to kill.

_Remember the German family in exile to France, _she tells herself, although the family's name in the classic novel has momentarily left her. _If that family had only accepted the monster . . ._

But what, exactly, is she trying to tell herself? That Warren was misunderstood? That if one thing in his past had been different, he may not have taken the road he had?

_If one thing in _my _past had been different, _she thinks, and shivers. _If Tara and I had stayed in bed a few minutes more . . ._

But that way lies madness, and so she stops before she can begin.

He is standing near inanimately in the centre of her living room, and in the faint glow of the streetlight glancing through the drapes she can make out very little of his face. Even if she had, the mud streaking his cheeks and the growth of stubble that had been absent at his death but probably present on the John Doe masks all but the staring, vacant eyes. She doubts he even remembers who he is yet. Buffy had not.

"Why don't you, you know, sit down?" she says patiently, and with a ginger hand nudges his elbow in the direction of the sofa. She tries not to think about the dirt, or the cleaning bill she will have when this is over. There are more important things. Like containment.

Yes, containment. She has known and planned for this all along. She can't allow a killer, a master criminal, or a speechless zombie free rein, even within the house. She has cleared the valuable items from this room, made the sofa into a bed, set bottles of water and the like under the coffee table, and she intends to make other arrangements for everything else. But for now, he is an animal. She has to treat him like one.

She takes herself clear of the area and stands, her chin turned down to her chest, her hands slightly extended before her, palms up. She begins to mutter a shielding spell softly under the breath, and around the living room a crackling globe of bluish light begins to build. She can release it for her own passage at will, but he will effectually be trapped inside. At least for the moment.

He starts at the lights around them, and dumbly reaches a hand out to touch it. It hums like a laser globe; the sparks and tendrils of light shoot to his fingertips like electric eels attracted by warm flesh. But the barrier is complete, and he goes no further. He can't.

"You should get some sleep," Willow says, cautiously. "Let the cobwebs clear out, yeah?"

But it is hours before he does. She is loth to disappear to her own bed, or even for water to mend her parched throat, until she is certain he's asleep. She sits, indian-style, on the narrow strip of carpet excluded from her spell like a walkway, and watches, and waits. He spends a long time examining the furniture left in the cell; even longer running his grimy fingers obsessively through his even grimier hair, as if to soften the mud-stiffed spines by willpower alone. For a little while he only sits and stares into space. And then, as her watch reads four a.m., he starts screaming. It is only after a confusion of minutes that she deciphers the words in those screams: his skin. His skin is gone.

By five a.m., he is asleep, an untidy sprawl above the spare bedclothes, one arm slung over the side, his face turned in to the pillow.

Willow stands, slips away, and cries in her bed until dawn.

To Be Continued . . .


	2. SLEEPWALKER

**Author's apologetic note: **I'm sorry this update has taken so long, I honestly didn't think anyone was reading this! Then I check back on a whim and whammo, there's reviews waiting and people wanting more, which is amazing. Here's the next part and now that I know the updates will come much more thick and fast.****

PART TWO - SLEEPWALKER

The first thing she thinks when she wakes up is _dear goddess, it was only a dream. _Her pillow is damp as if she has been crying - or else sweating - in the night, and her face is pressed half-suffocatingly into it. It smells like Kennedy still, but Kennedy is gone for now, of course - a Slayer must slay, after all.

Willow drags herself upright in a swoon and swipes her hair from her face with one clumsy hand, the knuckles smashing a little disjointedly into her left eyebrow as she does so. Could it have been a dream? How could she dream something like that, so . . . so damn vivid? What would that say about her state of mind?

_It means you haven't done paying yet, that's what. You should be in jail for what you did but you get this instead. You get to go on night after night without a moment's peace, with this person inside you, this person you killed._

But it's never been so intense before, and that worries her. If she didn't know herself better then she would swear she had dreamt the thing because she was actually plannng to do it, one night. But she wouldn't - she has played with those forces before and although now she knows what she would be getting into, it doesn't make it any less dangerous. Not really. She would be irresponsible, wicked even, to disturb that greater balance again simply to make her guilt go away. She had refused to listen at the time but Giles had been right - she had been, and wished she still could be, a rank, arrogant amateur.

The time for that has passed. There is nothing of magic she has not felt, seen, _been. _An amateur's role looks more attractive to her than the possibilty of Tara returning to her - almost. But she can never have that again. She can't go back.

She leaves her bed in a twisted mess behind her and heads to the kitchen. She should shower first, should wash the last vestiges of that dream away, but her head is too muggy for that. She feels, inexplicably, as if power has recently left her in a monstrous surge. She needs coffee more than she needs a shower, just now.

She swings into the lounge with her aching head cradled in one hand, and stops dead as she bumps into something. She knows the room inside-out, could walk it with her eyes closed, but here there is something that doesn't belong - something solid and tall enough to bump against her nose.

"Oww!" she protests, and takes the hand away . . . and sees two brown eyes staring at her. They are distorted only faintly by the sphere of energy between them.

"Thought of a better way to get rid of me?" he says, flatly. Nothing else.

Willow shakes her head and keeps going, ploughing past him into the kitchen, letting the door swing shut with a clap behind her. Now both hands cover her face and her head is hurting worse than before.

"No," she moans, and reaches out one hand blindly to twist the cold water on. "I didn't. I didn't. I _couldn't._"

But she already knows that she _could. _She _did. _It is coming back like the advent of spring, a chill wind chasing the edges of summer. In her lounge is a killer, twice over. In her lounge is also a victim. Hers. She swallows, and breaks the flow of water with both hands, catching its coldness and splashing it up into her face. It shocks her memories back with horrible clarity. She _could. _She _did._

An amateur, no . . . but still, she was arrogant. Still she broke the flow of the universe whenever she felt like it. And for what? For someone she hates with every particle of her soul.

With the hair at her scalp still damp on her brow, she turns and flicks on the coffee maker. Coffee, that was what she came down for. Damn it if she wasn't going to go at this one thing at a time.

She doesn't go out until the coffee is made, and poured; she only rests against the worktop with its cold edge cutting her spine in two, gnawing at her nails as the coffee percolates. Then she goes about finding mugs, cream, sugar, and places them on a tray she finds stuffed in one of the sideboards. When she ventures out, two mugs of fresh black coffee standing alongside the cream and sugar, her hands make the tray shudder like a bucking bronco at the rodeo.

He hasn't moved, and only his eyes follow her movements as she mutters a single word under her breath and passes harmlessly through the barrier. It zings back into place behind her like water finding its own level. They are fixed on her as she sets the tray down on the little coffee table Kennedy found in a flea market two months ago, and they slide down with her as she kneels, primly, on its opposite side. Whether she is expected to speak or not - whether he is capable of _understanding _her or not - she doesn't know. Maybe the accusation was a fluke; a single moment of sanity like an island in the sea. Or maybe he has only been playing stupid the whole time.

"Warren?" she ventures, at last - when the silence seems more suffocating than that pillow had, ten minutes before. "How do you take coffee? Assuming you even drink coffee, that is."

He doesn't answer. There is no surliness to it; he simply seems out of time with her, as if he might wait an hour, two, three, before understanding that a question has been asked.

"Well, maybe you don't," she stumbles, and begins to pour cream into her own, breaking it over the back of a teaspoon as her grandmother taught her to do. "Maybe it makes you feel kinda sick. My dad was like that. He said that coffee was the devil's work." She stirs her coffee, hesitates, then as an afterthought dumps two spoonfuls of sugar into the mug. After a beat, during which she studies the table so as not to look at him, she adds a third. "But then, I guess you'd know about that, too."

She couldn't resist that final dig - at least she had had the excuse of grief, the possession of dark forces outside her own, to account for her behaviour. Warren had never been anything but human.

She drinks her coffee in silence, expecting him to join her at some point - even a zombie, or, to be kinder about it, a shell-shocked child, would know when it was thirsty, or hungry, or tired. He doesn't move. Not an inch. She drains the last from the mug, and stands to take it through to the kitchen. She will rinse it out later, when she feels comfortable turning her back on him for a moment. Barrier or not, she won't risk that. His own knowledge of magic had been functional enough, in the end, to slow even her super-charged self down. If he _is_ faking - and she can't be sure that he isn't, even now - then he may know of some way to counteract her spell. She must be on guard at all times.

She dumps the empty mug in the sink and returns, again uttering that single word that will allow her to pass. Nothing has changed except that the thin white steam rising from the coffee has dissipated, leaving the air clear.

Scratch that - this air, this air that separates them, will _never _be clear. She will never forget the axe in her own back, the bullet in Tara's. The swell of bloodied flesh under Buffy's blouse as the injury was thankfully healed. But she can't help but remember the many hours of work she once put in on the Buffybot, repairing Warren's work, and at the time, admiring it. The fact that he is a genius makes him even more dangerous. But it also makes her wonder if it was the genius that affected his mind.

"Not thirsty, huh?" she says, and she settles herself down again. She nods at the mug. "I'm not workin' the mojo again if you starve yourself." But then, she thinks, if he were to starve himself, he would be doing the world a favour. Her conscience would be forever absolved but the world would still be a safer place. A _fairer _place.

_Go on then, _she thinks. _Take yourself out. Give me something to celebrate._

But even with her many reasons to hate him, she feels that this particular fantasy is beneath her. It is the sort of thing that Faith would think.

"Well, Mr. Chatty, if that's it for now I'm gonna go clean up. And I think you'd better follow my example after. Those clothes stink."

No response. She can't say that she expected any. Leaving the cold coffee in case he changes his mind, she strides off, closing the barrier neatly behind her.

She returns fully dressed - usually she would wander around for an hour or so after in a towel or her dressing gown, but she has no intention of doing that today. With a man watching. Xander or Giles, maybe - but no one else. The house is deathly quiet as she plods through to the lounge, her damp feet leaving dainty black imprints of a smudge and five toes in the carpet behind her. Warren is where she left him - sitting up on the sofa with the bedclothes still dented in his shape under him, the mug of coffee untouched on the table. The stubble has worsened since last night, but otherwise, he is static. If not for that stubble then she would be tempted to think it was his robot, and not the human version, sitting in her apartment.

"Your turn," she says, matter-of-factly. She imagines that she is talking to a child, or maybe a dog - it is easier than remembering, for a moment, that she is talking to a killer. "And I'm not takin' no for an answer, buddy-boy."

She frees the energy field, this time collapsing it completely, and marches across to the sofa. She tugs him to his feet with a yank of his elbow, not bothering to be gentle. She almost imagines that she sees a flash of indignation in his vacant eyes, something there and gone like a lightning-bolt from a clear sky . . . but she could have been mistaken. She is certainly jumpy enough, uncertain enough, to make that kind of mistake.

_As if I haven't already made enough of a mistake_, she thinks. It is enough to make her shove him the direction of the bathroom with even more force. But it is herself, and not him, that she is angry at this time. In the cold light of day, her decision to go through with this seems like the worst thing she could ever - _has _ever - done. But she can't ignore the relief of having him gone from the back of her mind.

As much as she misses Buffy and Dawn and the comfort of the Summers' house, she can't help but be grateful that she and Kennedy are renting a one-floor apartment these days. The difficulty of leading, shoving, and occasionally whacking him toward the bathroom is nothing compared to the difficulty she might have had in getting him up a flight of stairs. Her whole face seems to be straining away from the death-stench, her features attempting to crawl inside her head to escape it, but she focuses on the back of his wiry-haired, dark head, and consoles herself with the thought that this may be the last time she has to smell it. She nudges him into the bathroom, meaning to simply steer him in there and leave him to it, but hesitates, one hand curled on the edge of the open door, and doesn't close it. What are the odds, she wonders, that if she leaves him here and comes back in half an hour he will still be standing right where she left him, still filthy, still staring into the neverwhere like a plastic-eyed doll? Not just high. It is almost as good as a certainty.

Willow sighs, steps inside the bathroom, and clicks the door shut gently behind her.

"I'm just showing you the ropes, mister," she says, and is there a quaver in her voice, a tremble that had once belonged to it like her red hair belonged on her head? She thinks there is, and she bites down hard enough to make her teeth sing, angry at herself for her nerves. He - or at least, the Warren that she had killed, the Warren that had buried an axe in her back out of desperation and fear of her, would no doubt be thrilled to see her afraid of him now.

"I'm not, you know," she says, but aware, as she does so, that she is really talking to herself. "I'm not scared of you one bit, Mr Big Bad Wolf, so don't you think I am. All right? All right."

She turns - gingerly - to the shower, and twists it on hard. She slips a hand under the stream of water to test it, and steps back again.

"I don't care if you get in there fully clothed, Warren," she continued, her eyes darting over his lacklustre body, determining the best way to manhandle what must amount to a hundred and sixty pounds of young man across the bathroom. "In fact, I think I'd like it better that way."

She steps up closer and for a second her fingers twitch at empty air, psyching herself up to get a decent grip, and haul. She finds herself with her nose only inches from his and her eyes unwillingly finding that wide, plastic, doll-like stare. "But you _are _getting in there."

"Sure I am," he says, suddenly, and his fists flash outward and clamp around her elbows in the instant it takes for her to catch back her breath. "But I don't think you'll be getting out again."


	3. WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD

**Author's Note: **Thank you every that has reviewed thsi story so far and I hope I'm still hitting the target. I've been asked now if I intend to bring in other Buffy characters – I'd always hoped to be in Andrew at some point and definitely Kennedy, but now I'm toying with some other ideas. Keep watching this space!****

PART THREE - WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD

Willow shoves backward out of his grasp, plants a foot in his midsection, and kicks back with all her might. She feels his grip catch in her sleeve and slip, catch and slip, and she yanks backward again, almost free . . . when her back hits wood, and she collapses against the door, panting hard, her arms going slack as she realises that she is trapped. He pulls her forward by the elbows, away from the door, and rams her back against it, hard. She cries out, more surprised than hurt, knowing there is nobody to hear her. No neighbours. No Kennedy.

She has made sure of that.

"What did you do to me, Bitch? Huh? Is this a joke? This is a fucking joke, I get it. I do."

But his eyes have glazed over again, even as he speaks. There is some vacancy there, still, like a clock winding down. Oh, she won't be stupid enough to believe he is _totally _vacant, not again, but still she can see some faint doubt in his grizzled, grimy face. Some doubt of what he is saying. She can almost believe that he remembers

(skin his skin is gone)

what happened back in Sunnydale. That a part of him _wants_ to believe that this is a mind-trick, a collection of false memories, something she has done to him to make him believe . . . to make him think . . .

She feels a vicious yank at her hair, a great clump of it snarled around his dirty fingers, and she sees that his nails are black

(black like your hair little witch black like your heart)

and her hair stands out against his bone-white skin like fire. Like blood.

But she knows about blood. She has seen the skinless anatomy of man close up.

"Your hair. It's red," he says, and pulls again. She screams. "I liked it better black. Suited you. Lets people know what you really are."

Willow closes her eyes against the pain - bright pain, _livid_ pain - at her scalp, and focuses herself downward, down to her free fingertips. She is magically drained still, and it will take her some days to fully recuperate from the extreme rush of power that had left her last night; but she thinks that she can handle this one trick. Only a trick, like rubbing your shoes against carpet and touching a computer screen to generate an electric shock, but it may be enough. She focuses.

"You're going to tell me exactly what you and that Slayer bitch have done, strawberry, and then you're going to undo it. Right now. This minute. Doctor David Banner had it right when he said you wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

_Is that a Hulk reference? _she has time to think, despite her concentration. _Is he seriously quoting TV shows when we're fighting over life and death here?_

Wait - strawberry? Did he call me STRAWBERRY?

"Undo it!" he screams in her face, and a sweet gush of breath that still carries an aura of death, of decay, blows her hair from her face in a gale. "Whatever you did to me, UNDO IT! NOW!"

Willow can feel a gauze of grey descend over her eyes, his maniacal voice coming through a swollen soapy bubble, the pain at her scalp and the tingle and frisson of magic in her fingers almost forgotten. "I already . . . have," she gasps.

And strikes. As his face crumples in surprise she jabs her hand forward, as hard and straight as she can, and makes contact with his chest. The electric shock sends him jolting backward from her as if he has been thrown - and he smashes into the far wall of the shower cubicle, and sinks down into the pooling water in a boneless heap. Fragments of broken tile come with him, and behind she can see the gaps in the wall where they have been struck from. Darts of blood lace his dirty blue shirt. Blood

(red)

in tiny, circular splashes, running pink with the water, in the mishapen forms of

(strawberries)

some kind of squashed fruit. He is looking up at her with startled, but lucid, eyes.

"You think I won't like _you _when you're angry?" she says, with a composure she does not feel. "You ain't remembered nothin' yet."

_Sunnydale, May 2001_

She has always liked the deliberate starkness of the trees that flank many of Sunnydale's sidewalks - likes them, in fact, because _they are so deliberate. So methodical. Her magical inclination is to nature, to the tumble of its mussed beauty - there are no straight lines in nature - but she remembers the way that she would tap each one with her outstretched fingertips as she walked home from school as a little girl, Xander often babbling at her side, not caring if she listened or not. She would hear him in a fragment of her self; perhaps only on one side of the brain, the side belonging to the closest ear, but she would hear, and smile softly at his inanities. And she would count the steps between each of the council-planted trees - One for Sorrow, Two for Joy - until she had trodden the exact five hundred and two from the bottommost step of the Junior School to her own front door. Xander would wave her goodbye and be on his way, or else scuttle into her hallway with her, already demanding food. They were happy memories._

Willow stands behind the weighty trunk of an old oak - as old, perhaps, as the town itself - and wishes that she could believe there were more happy memories to come. But Tara is gone; it is easy to believe that there can be no more happy anythings.

She watches as a town police cruiser pulls up to the curb - no State Troopers, not yet, anyway - and two constables step out. Or maybe one is the Inspector, or whatever it is that they have. She had always been instructed, as a child, to call them simply 'Officer'. Whatever they are, there are two of them. The flashers are off and their dead black bulbs stare out into the gathering dusk with cold intent. She feels that they see her - and worse, that they know who she is, and why she is here.

It's not the scene of the crime, _she feels them whisper, _but it's a start.

_But they are only bulbs, after all - and the absence of that wailing blue light at least tells her that the police are not taking this seriously just yet. She still has time. Has to time to get out of Sunnydale until the investigation has died away. In a day or two she will be in England with Giles, and none of it will matter._

Except it will. She has heard the old axiom and knows that it is true: There's no running away from yourself.

The front door of the white-boarded house opens to the policemen on the step, and in the dull grey rectangle of the doorway, poorly lit from within, she sees the figure of a woman. She is dark, like her son; she has the same quick brown fox-like eyes, the same thatch of black hair refusing to stay in any one style. One thing is noticeably different. She is crying. Willow can't imagine this woman's son crying over anything.

Not that you would know, _she berates herself. Or is it those dull blue-black bulbs again, staring, staring, from their field of white-sprayed metal?_

Stop it! _she commands herself. But she won't, of course. It is only delayed._  
_  
Suddenly she wants to get very drunk._

_She waits for the police to be invited inside - surely they will be - but first she sees the woman - Mrs Meers - take a scrap of paper from her apron (Willow sees the apron as a sign of general motherliness, something she hadn't expected of any mother of his, she doesn't know why) and open it out as she hands it to one of the cops. Willow can see it - barely - but she doesn't need to. She knows, from Buffy's reports, what it will say._

TOO LATE.

"They thought it was a suicide," Willow says now to the stunned young man still sprawled in the base of her shower. The water has thrown steam in congealed beats like lifeblood pulsing from a heart wound, and he is soaked with it – ha-ha, through the skin, through the muscle, to the bone. "Yay for me."

He palms his drenched fringe from his forehead, bristling up spines of black hair like knives, and spits out a mouthful of water into the plughole. His eyes, usually quick, sharp, ticking with a warped intelligence out of reach of normal man or woman, are for once slow. Like a dog, she thinks, although she has never had one. She can imagine a bewildered dog looking up at its mistress in that exact same way, puzzling out its place, how far it can push, how much ground it can take. She waits for him to speak; not because she has come up dry, but because she is curious as to what his first questions will be.

"What? They, who's they? What was a suicide? Your girlfriend?"

He will regret saying that, she thinks, feeling blackness rise in a sick hiccup from the depths of her empty stomach. Not quite empty, of course – it is tainted with the bitter-burnt undertaste of cold coffee. He might not realise it now, but she won't forget that remark. Or the taunt that was implied within it.

"They knew Tara was murdered," she says, slowly. "There were eyewitnesses, remember? Three of us."

To that, he has nothing to say. He only glowers.

"Warren, your mother reported you missing about a week after . . ." But that sentence, at least, is one she can't bring herself to complete. She still doesn't know how much he remembers: judging from his reaction, it is possible he doesn't consciously remember his own death yet.

"After what, Red?"

_Red. Faith always called me Red. Spike always called me Red. I wonder if it's a killer thing._

But _she _never called _herself _Red. So probably not.

"Last night . . ." she says at last, feeling out the words from her mouth, relishing the oncoming moment when understanding would dawn on that scowling face but also, for some reason she can't design, not wanting to be the one to tell him. ". . . I performed a spell I've tried twice before. One of those times, it worked. On Buffy. The second time was . . . was Tara." She swallows, taking the coffee-slime back down. "That time it didn't work."

"What spell? You cast a _spell _on me, is that what you did? Is that why I can't remember anything?"

"Listen carefully, " she repeats, and now she feels she just might enjoy it, after all. "Listen to me, you big dumb neanderthal, because I know there's the brains in there to figure it out. You're a lot of things, Warren, but you're not stupid. Buffy died, a few weeks after you built her robot. I cast a spell three months later. You saw her alive after that."

Now he is staring at her, and if the expression there is not quite yet horror, then it very soon will be.

"I tried it on Tara—" and here she grit her teeth until the gums sang in protest "—when there was a bullet in her chest. It didn't work, but you _know _what I was trying to do."

The horror is complete. And she wants to relish it, to cherish this moment of stunned silence and total inability, she wants to treasure it up in her memory as the ultimate revenge for Tara . . . except that she hasn't brought him back for revenge. Only for a balancing of the scales.

"Like I said, the police thought it was suicide. The note you left for Buffy in the basement convinced them of that. People don't write TOO LATE unless they really mean it. Of course they wondered about the saw-blades."

"This is a joke. It is, I knew it. This is exactly the kind of crap that _I _would pull if I really hated somebody." He sounds relieved, and dares a grin in the same vein – but even he must know, must _feel, _how false it is. Let him believe that, if he wants. It's no skin of _her_ nose, ha-ha.

"Yeah, it's a joke, if you want. But it's on you, Warren. And it's not like they didn't have a good motive."

"Motive? Me? Uh-huh. _Nobody, _I repeat, _nobody, _would believe that I would kill myself. That's what you're saying, isn't it? They think I killed myself?"

She nods. He starts to move from the pool of water he is sitting in, very slowly, damp cotton sucking and dripping as he hooks one foot under him, braces one hand against the chipped wall, and stands up. Willow is instantly alert again, waiting for a move that may or may not come.

"That's ridiculous, _why _the hell would I do that? That's for losers. That's for the little pests like Jonathan that can't take the pace."

"They linked you to the murder, Warren. They thought it was guilt."

"Murder, what murder? You mean the witch?"

Willow stores up the second derogative like saving pennies, tucking it quietly aside with the first. Later. There will be time to pay him back for that later. For now, this is almost too much fun. And too much like evil.

"Not Tara. Katrina."

For a second he looks as though she has punched him. He sways on his feet but somehow manages not to stagger back.

"Warren," she says, with something like real pleasure in her voice, and she hates herself for it even as she nurtures it, helps the smile to rise to her face. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you _did _feel guilty about that."

"It was an accident. Nobody's fault. I don't feel 'guilty' about that stuff. Anyway, _she _attacked _me."_

"So you admit it?"

"Admit what?"

"That you killed her."

She has taken for granted, for minutes now, that the power over this discourse rests squarely, solidly, in her own hand – there has been not so much as a quiver in his favour. She has held all the cards, has _played _all the cards. Now, in the space of a second, as his eyes narrow into fox-like surety again and lock onto hers, as he draws himself up to his full height and uses it against her, she feels it overbalance and spill back to him like the single tip of a see-saw.

"You know I did," he says.

And God, she did.

---------------------

More coming soon . . .


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